Crazy hardware issues. Help.

[sw4qw]

Well, first off let me give a quick background on my problem.

It started out as random shutdowns, so I unticked the box that makes windows shut off on system failure and sure enough it became random BSOD. Nothing useful in determining the cause, always some different error whenever it happened.

My first try at fixing it was to open up the case and reseat the memory, video card, and all my cables and wires, because I had recently moved the computer.

That didn't help. So I reinstalled windows since all my important data is immediately moved to more permanent storage due to a paranoid mistrust of hard drives. This fixed the bsod but still did not cure the problem. Now I get random app errors, you know "Blah blah has experienced an error and needs to be shut down" or "quit unexpectedly" and whenever I try to install software its a gamble. It may install fine or I may get errors. More specifically I was installing some games and little boxes popped up during installation about md5's not matching. When they do install all patches fail, one said something about I/O errors or a corrupted file being a likely cause.

SO, here's what I know. Its NOT the hard drive (tried two: one pata, one sata with same exact errors). Its NOT the memory (have two 512's and it acts the same using each).

Motherboard? Not sure...

Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated. I'm stumped.

 

[kitty500cat]

What motherboard, power supply, and processor (CPU) do you have? It seems to me like a weak or faulty power supply.

--kitty

 

[sw4qw]

-AMD Athlon64 3700
-ASUS A8N5X Mobo
-ASPIRE 520W PSU

Faulty is a possibility I suppose. Weak, no. It's run fine for almost a year.

 

[sw4qw]

Okay, I picked up a new PSU and still having the same problems.

I reformatted and installed windows, and still I get problems that are apparently related to corrupt data. My test was installing and patching Battlefield 2 because that was giving me the most consistently similar errors.

I was able to get the game to install and patch, after running the patch a few times, then when I tried to play online I was kicked immediately with a message telling me that I had modified the .exe and need to restore the original file.

Same problem with FEAR. Modified game files. Corrupted.

Firefox also regularly exits with errors related to different dll's. Probably more corrupted files.

I ran memtest86 and well, I'm not sure if it matters but on the first pass there was 1 error. But I left it on all day and in over 200 passes the error never repeated.

Does that mean anything? Should 1 error that does not happen again be disregarded? I mean, I would definitely not be able to use my computer that long without problems, so would memtest miss it?

 

[kitty500cat]

Do you have any other RAM to put in it? It could be a hard drive error, too, but that seems kind of unlikely. How about virus scans? Picking up anything there (or are you like me, always forgetting to scan)?
--kitty

 

[Tedster]

how do you know it is not the memory? Have you tested it with memtest 86+?
PSUs are known to go bad over time. I had one that failed after 2 years.

 

[sw4qw]

Like I said, I did test with memtest and got one error. And I bought a new psu which made no difference.

The memtest error still doesn't really tell me whether its the mobo memory controller or the memory itself. Can't even get another error after leaving memtest running all night, twice.